Sex, Rock, and Reality

But after a few tours, when the ratio of good experiences to bad ones has started to sink in, the minimum criteria of enticement start to rise. Sneaking away with a girl sets in motion a whole chain of circumstances, and each one has to go exactly right for the experience to be worthwhile. A bad night with a deranged and drunk fan can ruin a whole week of subsequent shows. You can get sick, or lose a night of sleep that'll take five days to make up, and the blow to your self-confidence can darken an entire tour. I once had a more seasoned rock star laugh ruefully at me when I returned from an ill-fated encounter. He took one look at my dejected and disheveled slouch and said, "I knew she was bad news, she had high-maintenance hair."

After awhile, almost no circumstances will lure you away from the comfort of your bandmates and your routine. You become superstitious, even paranoid, waiting for the beautiful and fascinating fan who singled you out at the bar to suddenly reveal that she "knew you were a Virgo by your antennae" or that you "remind her of all of her dead boyfriends."

Once your band starts doing well, you might go through a second phase in which you start playing like a high roller. It's part of everyone's rock-star fantasy to stroll into a nice hotel at two in the morning with a foxy girl giggling on your arm and say to the desk clerk, "I'll take a room, my good man, with a king-sized bed." You feel like a real killer. But do it a couple of times in London or Berlin or New York City, and you'll start to feel like a chump who paid $350 for a plain hotel room to have some awkward sex and then get four hours of fitful sleep. It doesn't pencil out. The "real" high rollers are the musicians who can afford to have people carry their bags, set up their gear, and handle all the business while they traipse around teasing their hair and complaining about the deli tray. When you first make the transition from sleeping on people's floors to staying in hotels, it's seductive to think that the days of wine and roses are upon you, but as long as your band is still lifting its own amps, you've got no business spending $350 to have sex with a fan.

The fact is that most musicians are sensitive people almost by definition—certainly most singers are, otherwise what the hell are they whining about? And sensitive whiners are perhaps the least-suited people in the world to be having casual sex with worshipful strangers. Horny girls at shows don't take into consideration all the unique circumstances of musicians on tour, and they behave like horny drunk girls everywhere. They decide at the last minute that they're not over their ex-boyfriend, or they sober up enough on the long ride to their house to suddenly realize their roommate is home, or they just get a charge out of teasing, or whatever 10,000 other games get played in bars across the land, without considering that the musician they snared in their web has got to drive 600 miles tomorrow to play another show. If that musician was hoping to have a little casual sex to break the monotony of touring and give themselves a boost of self-esteem to make it through 2,000 more miles, they are in for some unhappy time on the cat-hair-covered papa-san.

The honest truth is that most touring musicians—unless they are complete sociopaths—learn to take it easy with the sex. There are rare occasions when someone extraordinary appears like a bolt of lightning after a show, and for those special people we musicians are eternally grateful. But the person with the unfocused eyes and "high-maintenance hair" is probably not going to shelter you from the storm so much as she's going to serve you undercooked Top Ramen and vomit on your shoes. Will you want to wake up next to her, especially if she has posters of your band on her bedroom wall? Yikes!

That said, see that drunk girl in the polka-dot dress and the bright red Mary Janes leaning against the bar and talking too loud to her slightly gothy friends? I know we have to be in Chapel Hill tomorrow, but she says she only lives 25 miles away, and if I put a couple of gallons of gas in her Honda Civic, she'll make me a late dinner at her place. I'll see you guys in the morning.

music@seattleweekly.com